ARM compatibility is why Intel can't win. ARM is the defecto standard upon all software that is mobile. What an ironic twist? As much as when phone stores decided to dump Windows Phones because there was not enough marketshare and software.

The PC is the mainframe.

I really wished Android apps being similar to java would be compatible with intel android? Without marketshare developers are compiling their apps for ARM only or using c++ code mixed in that is not portable.

Never have I seen a more apt typo - funny thing is, I saw a commercial last night for one of those PC repair/registry/whatever apps that practically shouted about how "Microsoft is using fear to make you buy Windows 8" (as opposed to your beloved XP box, natch.)

It all ties back to why Intel is now (should say, now more than ever) casting about, looking for new markets for their chips... PCs ain't selling, server lifecycles are getting longer (VMWare pretty much helped stretch that out), and there's not much outside of those two which would encourage PC sales.

(I wonder if Intel will ever stop navel-gazing at tablets and fire up their now-dead Digital Home Group [anandtech.com] again; they had a fairly decent idea with the chip-in-a-TV thing. Fun group of guys to work with as well...)

I would not dismiss Windows on the tablet. The new Phone OS is going to support universal apps so one app can run on the phone, tablet, and PCs which will help. I personally like Android but Windows big advantages are great development tools and a lot of developers. Now if Microsoft would just allow side loading on tablets and PCs like you do on PCs and PC based tablets.

Took the mouse about as long to take off.As I said I am a big fan of Android and have an Android phone, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10. I also have a macbook and run Windows and Linux on my desktop.Microsoft has great development tools and lots of developers. It would be foolish to not recognise those strengths.I want Microsoft to do well in the tablet market and I want Apple to do well and I want Android to do well. I like the idea of choice.

Good developer tools, yes, but I wouldn't at all say lots of developers. Windows (x86/x64/WPF) has a lot of developers. Windows RT has almost none. Windows Phone has almost none. Microsoft has been pushing really hard for developers to migrate, but they won't budge. (Examples that come to mind include them sending private emails asking developers of popular Windows apps to port them to the 8 store; most don't act on them at all, but outfits like the Mojang developers famously refused in public.)

The new universal apps and WP8.1 might change that. I don't even have an WinRT or WinPhone device but I write windows code for a living. The dev tools are probably the best in the industry and to be honest if you want to make a lot of money the WinPhone is a good target since as you point out it is not filled with apps yet but the phones are sell okay. Not at the IOS or Android level but well enough to make good money.

Windows on the tablet is pretty darn attractive - I've tried iPad, Android and Windows RT tablets, and *ALL* of them are missing things you really need. (Decent local filesystems and the ability to *fully* support the Internet, even for ugly-ass things like Flash and PDF, as well as reasonable printing support (RT only supports new printers) aren't optional.

BTW, this is really an argument for a full OS, not specifically for Windows. Good hardware for a full Ubuntu tablet (not Nexus crap, which is designed

The Surface Pro is more of a hybrid than a tablet. It does have a lot of value for some users. It is also more expensive. I really want to try one of those 8" Windows tablet but only if they are hackable. I really want to have the option to put Linux on them or keep windows if I want.

How so? Android apps are written in Java that compiles to Dalvik VM. Free apps that use NDK, such as those on F-Droid, can be recompiled by anyone. Proprietary apps that use NDK can be recompiled by their publisher if the publisher wants sales on the other platform. How big is the remaining set of apps that 1. use NDK, 2. are proprietary, 3. whose publisher is unwilling to take the money from Android/x86 users?

Any vendor that doesn't cross compile risks losing market share to one that does.

Unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile sues one that does for patent infringement or nonliteral copyright infringement. Or unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile benefits from a strong network effect among its users.

We all knew what he meant. Frankly, I didn't even notice it until you pointed it out. If you're so observant wouldn't disecting nuances of the article be a btter use of your time than spelling/grammar monitoring?

Intel-powered Android tablets can run almost all Android-ARM apps. Those that are native ARM apps are handled through binary translation. It works very well. I've used a Dell Venue 8 (Intel CloverTrail+ Android) and did not find any apps that wouldn't run just fine.

Intel-powered Android tablets can run almost all Android-ARM apps. Those that are native ARM apps are handled through binary translation. It works very well. I've used a Dell Venue 8 (Intel CloverTrail+ Android) and did not find any apps that wouldn't run just fine.

Is that done in hardware? Is there a performance penalty?

A related question about the programs you tried: were these computationally intensive games, or things like office apps and file managers?

It's done in software with hardware assist - Intel calls this technology "Houdini". Most Android apps are Dalvik which Intel has an X86-optimized implementation of. The translated apps run quite well for most purposes, but yes, there is a performance penalty. I did run some games but probably not the really compute-intensive ones. I found the performance overall quite good - at least as good as my iPad 3 - and to most users the choice of processor would be transparent. For apps which are ARM binary, a growing number are also providing X86 binaries.

No, at the time Intel was trying to trim down as they had overextended themselves and too many unprofitable departments. I worked in that department shortly before it was sold off; right before that, the department head "resigned" on the heels of very poor performance. Around that time, they also got rid of their consumer products division which made wireless keyboards and mice and a crappy digital camera. Not long after, they went through a big downsizing called "SET" where they just got rid of people all over the company. They went from around 100k employes down to around 80k in just a couple of years.

I think Intel wanted to try to scale the x86 down. That's where the Atom came from. Unfortunately, they could never get it to work on a power scale that competes with ARM before ARM hit 1 GHz. That seems to be the speed at which processors become good enough to do most anything useful. With the Cortex-A8, the Atom was in serious trouble. The Atom is now positioned as too much for a tablet or phone (and doesn't support most Android apps) and not enough for desktop or laptop (it can't handle more resour

Intel inherited XScale from DEC, which called it StrongARM, as part of the patent lawsuit settlement that also netted Intel DEC's Hudson, Massachusetts chip fab. Xscale actually did quite well for Intel, but as you say, they sold it off to Marvell.

Intel can do fine. They make some amazing tablet platforms. They just need to stop deliberately making them incompatible with the sort of software people want to use, defeaturing the platform to prevent competition with their other products, and providing price incentives that encourage a gimped final product. It is not that difficult.

I used up my mod points tonight, and well you did post AC so it's kinda a waste. That said I agree with you. Why is it that my W8.1 tablet (ok its i5) boot up in a few seconds whereas my W8.1 phone takes over a minute? Same kernel.

Try a Nexus 7 2013. It has all the performance and power you need with all day battery life and a glorious high-def display for only $229, or less on sale. This was the target last fall, and Intel doesn't have a chip in this class. Soon maybe, but then they will probably try to tie it to Windows again and fail utterly. This Christmas you need this and QHD to make a splash.

I'm typing this reply on Asus Transformer TF701T, and I've checked Bay Trail. If this is Intel's answer, then they better get back to the drawing board, yesterday!This tablet has 2560x1600 resolution and from my experience the battery holds for 14 hours (it got 2 of them). On many occasions I use it without keyboard and I get around 5.5 hours of battery, try that with Bay Trail (without dimming the screen to an unreadable condition!).

No, the PC is the refrigerator. Tablets are the beds. A home needs exactly one refrigerator (more are a luxury), but it needs about one bed per person. Now consider that people have been sleeping in refrigerators for the past 20 years. Thus, the market for refrigerators is highly over-saturated, and the market for beds is seeing explosive growth as millions of people have never had one before. In the end, though, everybody still needs a refrigerator. There may come a day when they don't, but everybody knows that a refrigerator isn't a bed.

Yes, the metaphor is a bit strained.

Point being that consumers are realizing that tablets do about 90% of what they want in a PC, so they just buy tablets. That doesn't mean they don't occasionally need something for that remaining 10%. We may see tablet docks that turn a tablet PC into a full desktop setup, but we're not there yet. I can browse the web, watch a movie, play a song, look up information, and type an email or text on a tablet or phone. I can probably do my online banking -- although it's a bit cumbersome. I wouldn't want to write a paper, or seriously manage my finances, or do photo editing, or do my taxes on a tablet (unless I was single, had no kids, had one job which withheld taxes, and did not own a home).

Besides, all Intel has to do is make a better ARM than ARM. They did that before when AMD introduced AMD64, and now that Intel fabs ARM, they can learn the ins and outs of that, since obviously there's something there that they missed. Intel still has the most advanced fabrication plants in the world. It would be foolish to write them off so quickly.

No, the PC is the refrigerator. Tablets are the beds. A home needs exactly one refrigerator (more are a luxury), but it needs about one bed per person. Now consider that people have been sleeping in refrigerators for the past 20 years. Thus, the market for refrigerators is highly over-saturated, and the market for beds is seeing explosive growth as millions of people have never had one before. In the end, though, everybody still needs a refrigerator. There may come a day when they don't, but everybody knows that a refrigerator isn't a bed.

Yes, the metaphor is a bit strained.

Point being that consumers are realizing that tablets do about 90% of what they want in a PC, so they just buy tablets. That doesn't mean they don't occasionally need something for that remaining 10%. We may see tablet docks that turn a tablet PC into a full desktop setup, but we're not there yet. I can browse the web, watch a movie, play a song, look up information, and type an email or text on a tablet or phone. I can probably do my online banking -- although it's a bit cumbersome. I wouldn't want to write a paper, or seriously manage my finances, or do photo editing, or do my taxes on a tablet (unless I was single, had no kids, had one job which withheld taxes, and did not own a home).

Steve jobs has some sort of quote about PCs (Windows & Mac) being like trucks, always a need for them but not what everyone needs. It's true though. Three years ago when I went on a trip I'd pack my Netbook to use at the hotel, or at my folks place. Now I'll use a tablet. Much quicker to pick up and use than to pull out and set up and boot a PC (netbook). Mobile has excelled at other things. Though I still like my real digital camera, if I want to take a picture of something and quickly email it off it's a lot easier to use my smartphone. Checking my email is a lot easier on my phone than on a computer (especially at work waiting for the Corporate-bogged down IT image of XP to load on my i7), though composing an email (or this post) I rather use a PC.

Like yourself I like PCs for the heavy lifting: manage photos, do finances / taxes, download media, edit videos / photos. Though I do worry that our options and availability for relatively open PC like platforms may diminish, which wouldn't be a good thing.

Kinda what I was thinking. x86 is now ancient, and unless things have changed a lot in the last few years, tend to be pretty power hungry.

They're power-hungry in comparison to lower-end ARM - a Cortex-A9 is far more efficient. However, they also perform circles around them. But the latest Atom tablet chips are neck-and-neck with similar Cortex-A15 chips (both in performance and in battery life), and the Core ones get a usable battery life while being more powerful than many laptops. In terms of performance-per-watt they're effectively the same.

Oddly, Intel's biggest tablet success was the Surface Pro - while it tanked as a general tablet, it

Yep, I have a surface pro 2. I love it for zbrush. It's a one of a kind device for that kind of work. Literally nothing else exists.
For the price of a cintiq you get the computer too. I wish they advertised it heavily to artists, instead of ipad users.
An ipad user is going to be like "this thing weighs like 5 pounds and is a half an inch thick, I want my dollar/mass ratio to be close to infinity!".
An artist will be like "You mean I can do my zbrush sculpting at a coffee shop with the same workflow that I use on a cintiq, AND it can handle 15m tris like a champion? Yes please."

Microsoft is really onto something with the whole Surface Pro idea, and It boggles my mind that not a single one of the "regular" OEMs have managed to build anything even in the same league. This product alone is justification for Microsoft being in the non-peripheral hardware business, despite the OEM friction it undoubtedly causes.

The Surface Pro is further proof that Steve Jobs was flat wrong when he said of iPad competitors, "If you see a stylus, they blew it!"

Intel are reducing power consumption and maintaining performance faster than ARM can improve processing power while keeping power consumption down. The current version of the iPad has a lot more processing power than the first one did but it has a battery three times bigger to give it the same endurance between charges, in large part because the newer ARM chips suck more power than their predecessors did.

Intel-based tablets like the Iconia W series (i3/i5) or Toshiba Encore (Atom quad-core) have the same endurance as ARM-based tablets with similar battery capacities while running a full-fat desktop OS rather than a phone OS with delusions of competency.

Thank you. So few people seem to see what is going on and how that is going to continue.

Android x86 is going to take down Android ARM within a few years and Windows 9 is going to go down with it. In fact, if Android x86 had been a bit more mature a week ago, 80% of the people that have switched to Windows 8.1 would have switched to Android x86 instead.

It is clear that Intel has been asleep in this market, but it is even clearer that they are on the war path and intent on destroying Qualcomm and ARM in gener

A mobile 'desktop' has its uses. I LOVE having an 8" tablet that can act as a server or AP if i need it to. No website ever tells me 'not available on mobiIe'. I bought it to make up for any bullshit deficiencies my ARM based mobiles devices might have, like transferring files to each other.

Yep, and you need a 30-100 MB app for pretty much every little task you do. A good OS, built the right way, provides a strong set of basic tools that can be used together to do almost anything the user wants. Personally, I *do* want a real OS on a tablet - because there are just way too many real-world tasks that tablets either can't do at all or can only do with ridiculous levels of complexity and frustration. Real filesystems are just the beginning. FWIW, I'd rank the usability of tablet OSes for rea

it's not the CPU. the display is the battery hog, particularly the backlight which needs to be more powerful due to the retina display [iirc]. next is the graphics chips, which needs extra power to do the graphics for that display.

the cpu is generally the thing that doesn't use a lot of power [for general usage] because it gets powered down after it gets its work done, even while the display and graphics chip are going strong.

We're in the process of revamping my company's IT infrastructure: About 30 Wintel PC's, 3 Wintel Servers, and 0 *pads.

Unfortunately for my company's employees, we don't make money from watching Netflix or playing whatever this week's hot game is on tablets. We have to do work to earn money, and we can't do work on tablets or phones.

We've actually deployed quite a few tablets in the field to replace laptops that never worked very well for the task. Can't really use them while walking around.

For servers, desktops, thin clients, and laptops we have a number of different combinations of processors and operations systems including Windows 7 and 8, Ubuntu, OS X, debian, and VMWare ESX/ESXi. We also have a PBX, access points, routers, switches, modems, printers, gateways, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos utilizing various processors and OSes (thou

This is just the flip side of Windows RT. Microsoft developed RT to hedge their bets. If the market stayed with x86, they could sell regular Windows. If the market switched to ARM, they could sell Windows RT. RT didn't need to be successful, it just needed to be there.

Now Intel is doing the same - they're hedging their bets. If the market stays with Windows, they can can sell CPUs for Windows machines. If the market switches to Android or whatever OS over Windows, then can sell CPUs for those machi

Though both are hedging as you say, I think both desperately want the other to overwhelmingly succeed. MS on ARM is not competitive due to a complete lack of support for legacy x86 applications and an otherwise uninspired design, so MS wants the world to run on x86 where they have home court advantage. Similarly, while Intel still has mostly better offerings, they cannot extract the desired margins out of such a highly competitive market like ARM where people will go without the very latest semiconductor

Surely the engineers (software and other kinds) and the content creators will still need powerful general purpose computers to enable them to do their work effectively. These really can't ever go away, at least for the foreseeable future (~50 yrs). Oh it might change somewhat, but for the most part there isn't any reason to change from a general purpose computer. So there will always be some market for those types of computers. Not to mention the scientific community needs (an

For years MS had a near monopoly on drivers. Basically every device manufacturer made a driver for MS and maybe, kind of, sort of, possibly got around to a Mac driver, and then occasionally made a Linux driver. Thus anyone wanting to take on Windows would have had to reverse engineer and make a whole slate of device drivers. As an example, by Mac OS X making the switch to Intel it allowed hardware companies to more easily port their drivers so a few more did.

But over time Linux did managed to do just that, but being open source those drivers are then much more portable to entire other architectures such as ARM. This is then combined with the fact that few people hook devices up to their tablets makes for a near perfect environment to completely overtake the Wintel monopoly on drivers.

So for the first time in decades a consumer does not worry or even know about any driver issues and can choose their device and OS based upon features that are genuinely meaningful to themselves; such as price, app availability, and quality of the hardware.

So with the playing field is now much more level it is not surprising that the former Wintel monopoly is losing market share.

But there is a second and very critical issue and that is of CPU power. Quite simply a Raspberry Pi is around the minimum power that a typical Browser surfing, youtube watching user needs to have. Thus most people don't need the latest and greatest CPU to power their needs. So a halfway good arm inside a device is well enough for the vast majority. Also most people don't need to do much on their computers. A few simple games, some surfing, some video, some messaging. Thus a mobile device is becoming most people's primary portal to the world. Again this does not need to be a powerhouse; it just needs to be reasonably price, work well, and have a good battery life.

But lastly there is the way that ARM is structured. From what I can tell, if you want to buy 10 million arm processors then you buy 10 million arm processors. But if you want to buy 10 million Intel processors then Intel wants to make it complicated and have you enter into a "relationship". The same with the android OS vs the Microsoft OS. Personally I would be very wary dealing with either Intel or MS in that if suddenly my product was somehow incompatible with some corporate vision they had then they would cut me off or otherwise strangle my company. But ARM and Android just want you to buy/use their products.

I suspect that neither of these companies are going to adjust well to actually having competition who aren't even playing the same game meaning that neither Intel or MS will be able to squirrel the rules. Does anyone remember the phase Dell went through where they were Intel only? Can you imagine the angry conversations when Dell, HP, or anyone like that started to ship Linux machines? Do you think that anyone shipping ARM devices even wonders what ARM thinks?

No, Intel were using Imagination Technologies' (IT) GPUs for their low power chips, and IT was not giving up the hardware specs for open-source drivers that could be used with the Linux kernel that lies under Android. GP is exactly correct. I hear IT is beginning to come to their senses, but this issue is a big part of how we got to where we are today. You are also right that they didn't change fast enough.

Basically what I was saying was that they were leaning on being the primary CPU within the Windows environment which effectively depended upon its massive driver library. So where Intel screwed up was not realizing that drivers were becoming more available and less necessary; which meant that they were leaning on a soon to be looser.

I think this belief in Microsoft also clouded their judgement as to where smartphones were going. Microsoft never really took Smartphones seriously so I don't think Intel did

We have used a Raspberry Pi to compile RTEMS (rtems.org) to target the space hardened SPARC V7 ERC32 as well as gdb including a simulator. The Raspberry Pi does this and runs the tests on a simulator at approximately the same performance level as a mid-90s Sun workstation. It is a respectable CPU and great for many "ordinary" computer tasks.

Intel are determined to sell 40 million of their tablet chips, but they certainly aren't going to make any profit, because of "contra revenue"."Intel is charging customers about the same as Allwinner and Rockchip for tablet CPUs â" $5 a pop, reports Digitimes"http://www.electronicsweekly.c... [electronicsweekly.com]

No surprise that their mobile group lost nearly $1 billion last quarter.

It runs fine. It just doesn't sell. With 200 million tablets moving each year, Intel would like to own more of that space than Windows tablets can give them. It doesn't matter how well they make Windows run on a tablet if people won't buy tablets with Windows on in any significant number.

In addition to the UEFI requiring bootloaders signed by Microsoft, or security features turned off, there is the use of PowerVR graphics from Imagination Technologies (IT). For many years IT did not support the api documentation required to make a good open driver for these Intel devices. As Platforms there were several other parts of the reference platform that were Windows Only. Co-marketing dollars were applied to Windows devices only, and so on. You think we don't know about the myriad games Intel p

Microsoft and Intel should be best friends. They are each others main hope for relevance. Intel competing against the horde of ARM vendors on even ground is not going to end well for Intel's margins no matter how much share they hypothetically get. In much the same way that MS is nothing without the momentum of decades of x86-only applications, Intel isn't much without MS applications. Well, Intel's products are a bit respectable in their own right, but the primary driver of their large margin is the x8